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From the September 2005 AN Environmental Justice Pushed Backwards by Bush Administration Melissa Checker In 1982, an African-American community in Warren County, North Carolina, staged what became a national protest against the installation of a 142-acre polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) landfill in its neighborhood. Subsequently, the US General Accounting Office (GAO) investigated the correlation between landfill sites and socioeconomic variables, particularly race and income. They reported in 1983 that three of the four commercial hazardous waste facilities in EPA Region 4 (serving the southeast) were located in minority areas and the fourth was in a low-income area. The protest, along with the GAO’s findings, fueled a national grassroots-driven movement, known as environmental justice.
That movement reached a milestone in 1994 when President Clinton issued Executive Order 12898, “Federal Action to Address Environmental Justice in Minority Populations and Low-Income Populations,” to ensure that such populations are not subjected to a disproportionately high level of environmental risk. The order requested that each federal agency make environmental justice part of its mission by identifying and addressing disproportionately high and adverse human health or environmental effects of its activities on minority populations and low-income populations. For environmental justice activists, this order was by no means a remedy for environmental injustice; but in its official recognition of the problem, the order seemed like a good first step. Rather than propelling an environmental justice agenda forward, however, five years of the current Bush administration have pushed it several steps backward. Although in 2001 former EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman publicly restated the agency’s commitment to environmental justice, her commitment did not specify that environmental justice applied specifically to minority and low income populations. That same year, environmental activists organized to protest the Bush administration’s Clean Air Market Trading plan, which would allow dirty power plants to buy emissions rights from plants that have cleaned up their toxic emissions. Alarmed by the ramifications such a plan could have for minority and low income communities where many dirty power plants sit, the non-profit group, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, requested the Inspector General’s Office to study the EPA’s progress toward environmental justice since the 1994 order.
The Inspector General’s March 2004 report, “EPA Needs to Consistently Implement the Intent of the Executive Order on Environmental Justice,” concluded that under the Bush administration “the [EPA] changed the focus of the environmental justice program by deemphasizing minority and low-income populations and emphasizing the concept of environmental justice for everyone.” Moreover, the report stated that while the EPA has made an attempt to endorse environmental justice training, in part by issuing an environmental justice “toolkit,” and to require that all regional and programmatic offices submit environmental justice “Action Plans,” steps to implement environmental justice policies nation-wide have been inconsistent. As a result, the degree to which a minority or low income person benefits from environmental justice measures depends entirely upon how the EPA region in which the person resides interprets the order. Responding to a draft of the Inspector General’s report, the EPA disagreed with the central premise that Executive Order 12898 requires the EPA to identify and address the environmental effects of its programs on minority and low-income populations. Rather, the EPA affirmed its belief that the order “instructs the agency to identify and address the disproportionately high and adverse human health or environmental effects” of its programs, policies and activities. In other words, the EPA simply restated its reason for being—to protect everyone from harmful environments. Certainly, we all need environmental protection. But the point of the US environmental justice movement, and the 1994 executive order, has been to recognize that some people are less protected than others. Our current president’s circumvention of this fact threatens to bring us all the way back to square one. Melissa Checker is a member of the AAA Committee on Public Policy and the author of Polluted Promises: Environmental Racism and the Search for Justice in a Southern Town (2005).
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